2023-08-18 04:00:00
After two dreadful years, can the Canadiens aspire to make the playoffs this year?
Beyond the high hopes and progress, the question that often comes up for this year is this.
Fans, who put part of their pay to attend a game, want to know if it’s over, the time when victories will be as important as a sprig of parsley in a bowl of spaghetti.
I’m not saying that the fans absolutely want the team to be right for the spring dance, but rather that they want to know it to measure their expectations and plan if the team will have to meet them, in front of their television, 82 times this season.
We want to prepare to prepare our spouse on the attention we will pay to the CH.
We want to know if it will be worth spending $500 at Christmas to tell the kids that we’re going to see the Canadiens in February. With gasoline, hot dogs, popcorn and a few beers, it will even cost double.
All fans are very happy to know that the team is going in the right direction and may even aspire to great things in three years.
Photo Martin Chevalier
But the limit of the fans’ patience was tested hard last year, with decisions that exposed the fact that management was happy to improve in… defeats.
Fortunately, Martin St-Louis did not always seem to agree.
In short, it was still the wave last year, in front of a club at the bottom of the classification which lost in the third period.
But, patience will not be eternal, as my colleague Jean-François Chaumont rightly reminded us in the Canadian end-of-season report in April.
Fewer waves
Without expecting too much, fans may not accept another season like the last. It may be less popular this year if the team is already out of the race at Christmas.
“I don’t know if we will make the playoffs, but we will push,” general manager Kent Hughes said last April, regarding the 2023-2024 season.
However, with the help of experts from Sportlogiq, which specializes in advanced NHL statistics, The newspaper tried to analyze where the Canadian stands in relation to the clubs in its association this year.
But above all, I wanted to assess how far away the CH really was from the race last year.
Photo Martin Chevalier
It was clear at the start of the season that the team was not aiming for the playoffs. But she defended herself very well in the first weeks. Then Sean Monahan got injured. And then Kaiden Guhle.
And the chain landed.
According to the NHL Injury Viz site, which measures how badly teams are affected by injuries, the Canadian was the second most heavily affected team last year. The Blue Jackets come in first.
To give you an idea, the Canadiens had 10 times more injuries than the Rangers, six times more than the Lightning and three times more than the Bruins.
Not much better
Thus, according to Sportlogiq, in a miraculous scenario where the Canadian had no injuries, we might have expected the team to score 245 goals during the year. The club instead made 232.
So that’s 13 more goals. In other words, the team would not have been so bad and would have been in the race longer. It would have been just enough to forget Connord Bedard earlier… but forgetting the playoffs too.
For the next campaign, we did the same exercise, asking the Sportlogiq robots to predict how many goals each Eastern Conference team would score.
We used the trainings suggested by the CapFriendly site. Rookies weren’t included in these predictions since the bots obviously don’t have any NHL data to rely on.
Thus, the Canadian is progressing rather well when we can expect 248 goals, which places him 10th out of 16 in the East in this regard, just behind the Sabers and the Lightning, but ahead of the Red Wings and the Capitals, in particular.
Little unusual fact, we had done the math before the Petry trade to Detroit, and the projection without him was four goals more.
Obviously, the number of goals scored does not establish whether a team is likely to participate in the playoffs, especially since these are projections.
A good example: it was the Sabers last year who were second in the East, but they finished 10th. It was too difficult defensively.
However, of the eight teams that scored the most goals last year in this conference, seven made the playoffs, with the exception of the Hurricanes.
We agree, scoring goals is always a good idea to win.
Some highlights of these robot projections
THE CH CLIMBS
Photo Martin Chevalier
The Canadian goes from 14th place (2022-2023) to 10th place this year with a projection of 16 more goals. It would be one of the best progressions in the estimates, but with a defense still young, everything indicates that it will be far from enough to expect a participation in the playoffs.
DEPARTURES THAT HURT
Photo Martin Chevalier
The departures of Patrice Bergeron and David Krejci would be catastrophic for the Bruins, who, according to the robots, would go from the team that scores the most goals (305 last year) to the team that scores the least this year, with 234. However, I would not bet on that. Boston always finds a way to win, especially when the team is underrated.
THE PENGUINS WILL BOUNCE BACK?
Photo Martin Chevalier
Pittsburgh shouldn’t have finished ninth in the East in goals scored, according to the bots (with just 262 goals), as projections put Sidney Crosby’s squad in second place this year with 298 goals. The arrivals of Erik Karlsson and Reilly Smith also changed the game.
OTTAWA GOES TO ANOTHER LEVEL
Projections put the Senators fourth with 281 goals. Ottawa finished 10th last year, partly due to several injuries.
THE MACHINES OF THE EAST
Certainly, by noting the numbers of last year and those that the robots project, everything indicates that the Devils are likely to aim for the top, like the Panthers, the Hurricanes, the Maple Leafs and the Rangers.
1692353902
#Robots #analyze #Canadian #aim #playoffs #year